


How Does One End Up In That Situation

by Totally_Not_An_Awkward_Okapi



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: But we're just ignoring that, Child Abuse Mentioned, Dissociation, Gen, I mean. Obviously yes, Kidnapping, Neither of them actually remember (thanks psychic powers) so did it really even happen?, Original characters as needed?, Wallowing in self pity because what else are you going to do, What happened between him and Eli?, i guess, they don’t have names or anything, ’cause baby mantis y’know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:49:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25909132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Totally_Not_An_Awkward_Okapi/pseuds/Totally_Not_An_Awkward_Okapi
Summary: Thinking about Baby Mantis having a meet ugly with his new employers.
Kudos: 9





	How Does One End Up In That Situation

Not for the first time, Tretij Rebenok considered his life. He had no shame about occasionally wallowing in what memory he had left of his short, miserable life. So he engaged in it frequently enough, even if just to burn away at more edges. Now was no different so as he walked down the streets of some Russian town with a Russian name he let himself drift into it.

He knew his own timeline was a mess. When you were the only living soul who remembered your existence let alone history, it was bound to become spotty. There were many ways to structure any history, but especially his own. By his powers, by his kills, and by the blank spaces in his own mind where among his favorite for wallowing, but today was a more general wallow sort of day.

He was born in some nameless Czechoslovakian town. The town may have had a name, but during his relatively short time living there no one had bothered to tell him it. He learned, just before the town stopped needing a name at all, that other assumed he knew it or was too stupid to understand if they told it to him, so never told it. Much like the town, he never remembered having a name himself. He knew, very loosely, he had had one. Maybe Tretij was his name and he had siblings? If he did, then they were gone or dead well before he killed anyone by his own hands. Or mind. But he found that unlikely. He was quite sure that Third Child was a code name he had been given by the Soviets.

Over time the town got louder, though he learned not to say that out loud quickly. No one liked him complaining of obviously false things, such as a dying town somehow getting louder as it died. If he tried to pick out when he started knowing others minds, or someone put a gun to his head, or strapped him down in a facility for pushing the boundaries of human ability and finding out what they could really do, he would say he never ran into anyone. No matter how sudden or lost in thought, never did he collide with any living things. Not to say he wasn't clumsy. He just knew everyone's positions well. He could lie to himself and his father back then about it though. He had heard them coming, that was all.

Then he heard their emotions coming. It developed quickly, probably because of how often he used it to keep safe of his father. It also meant he cried frequently, miserable whenever something went poorly for anyone too close to him. Which only made his father's anger grow. So he used it more to know how long to wait. But there were some good days. A silver lining can only do so much when it is so small, but there were some things that kept him from completely burning away this time in his memory. Like when the time for festivals or circus came around and he skipped down the road. Buoyed on comfortable emotions and excitement. He remembered thinking at the time it felt like he was floating. It didn't actually feel that similar at all it turned out.

When exactly thoughts came was the hardest to pin down. He honestly wasn't sure if it had been some huge leap in his powers or if it had really just been so slow he didn't realize until he talked to someone before their mouth opened. Who they were didn't really matter. He'd burnt out their face long ago and doubted he ever had their name.

Even then, he had the distinct feeling that he'd held off that discovery by quite some time by spending so much time in the woods. When he first started wandering off, his father’s rage had nearly made him give it up entirely. But then his father stopped yelling at him about it, only grumbling about it when he came back. This he had questioned. He had bothered to ask why. His father said nothing. His father SAID I don’t care. He should just stay out there already. At least it keeps him out of my way and from having to see his ugly face. Nothing about the words surprised him that much. Sure, the words were oddly framed and also distinctly weren't quite words, though he couldn’t ever place what was off about them, but it wasn’t really anything new. So he shrugged it off.

But after realizing why everyone was being so much more frank, had started being so much louder, and why the sound seemed to carry differently, he was just excited. His father was right to say he wasn’t a smart child, as his assumption was just that this was something everyone did but that there were some polite rules about it. So he just started listening in, usually late at night or while helping out at any of the farms outside of town so it wasn’t too much, but he started to try and learn it all the same. People thought in different ways, which was interesting to decipher. Different languages, different styles, and not even all of them thought with sentences. Some thought so differently from how they talked, he noted.

His father talked much the same way he thought, though. No curse, insult, or paranoid accusation filtered through his mind without becoming spoken word. What he did hold in fell out with a touch of alcohol or a tiny mistake on anyone fault. Though Tretij would be the one he blamed for it. But something underlined the thoughts. Something he had believed so long it had become deeper than his thoughts, verging on memory. Tretij wanted to know this. So one day, when the noise of the town was so bad his father dragged him to the door, he let himself sink. He sunk below the foaming emotions, pulled himself deeper through the waves of thoughts, and pushed towards the source.

His father hated him. His father hated him not in the way he “hated” the donkey when it did what donkeys were bound to do and disobeyed. Not the way he thought about how he hated the butcher in town. He didn’t even hate him in a way that wanted to give him a piece of his mind, or even a fist. He hated him in the way that he blamed him for his mother’s death and wanted him dead in return. And he was terrified, so he tried to swim back out of what he had found. And he saw himself through his father.

When he wanted to be more poetic, he would say that the next thing he saw was his new face through the doctor's eyes. He had looked after he watched the doctor holding dirty gauze and looking for the cleanest section to use to wrap the worst of it. He remembered that phrase. ‘The worst of it.’ How it referred to his face. How it had spurred him to look. How he’d laughed. How it fit much better with what his father thought he looked like. How in the same way he used his powers, he made what was thought real. How maybe it was the first time some angry man made their vision true through him. But that was when he wanted to be poetic. Because there was a memory between those times.

He’d woken up and everything had hurt. He’d sunk in what his pain addled brain had said was black snow. It was hellish. He couldn’t even put together if he was burning or freezing to death. Even if he could, he had no strength to pull off his clothes should this have been the confusion of hypothermia or the panic of a burning body. And yet. There was something dreadfully wonderful. Beautiful and terrible in equal measure. It was quiet. Not quiet like the forest. No underlying push and pull of the forest’s tide. Of life’s tide. It had all boiled away.

Why exactly he never burned away this memory he wasn’t sure. Why it stayed so fresh he could guess at though.

The hospital was a different sort of hell. Only bad people were in hell, he remembered learning from sulking about the town’s church. He also initially doubted any god was so cruel to add the pain, fear, and sorrow of everyone in the damned place onto the shoulder of someone who already had their own ordeal. He quickly realized that a god might come up with that punishment in return for what he’d done. He heard it sharp as he learned to try his best to ignore all the rain and focus just on the minds around him. Not that it did much good. A single line of rain is hard to focus on in a hurricane. What little throat he had left was subjected to his near constant scream. He didn’t talk much before the incident, which he gave a hundred reasons for, but now that didn’t matter much. There was never a need for the excuses. Eventually the screaming was silenced through drugs and letting him destroy whatever regrowth his throat had made. Whichever came first.

His consciousness floated through black waves and rarely came up for air. One day he tried to speak the other way when he found himself awake. They panicked. People came. They gave him his mask. Then sweet relief flooded him as he felt not silence, but the quieting of all those minds. An umbrella in sleets of rain. The sound of the emotions muffled, the drenching thoughts only occasional splashing up and pooling at his feet.

They told him he was being sent from the hospital to Moscow. He heard how after it was Leningrad then Serbia and finally to Novosibirsk after that. ‘A school.’ He was told would be his destination. ‘Clinical trials.’ The doctors and nurses were told it would be, minds running wild with what that would entail. The agents stayed far away and only the ones whose first language wasn’t Chezec would go near him. He knew they were trying to keep him from understanding their thoughts. He could still tell in the agents thoughts as they moved him that they spoke in half truths. 

First came the tattoos. Strapped down, sedated only to not fight back, and then marked. Barcodes, so he couldn’t even have the dignity of being branded like a prize colt and was instead just an item. A weapon.

But if the mask was an umbrella, what happened in the plane was a lightning strike. This time he knew what his body was doing. Flames wrapping around him and the plane crushing like a can. The second time he was the only survivor of a disaster of his own making. This time though, the power stuck. He crashed close enough at least, only a short time spent using the wreckage for warmth to add to the scars in his mind and testing his powers. He did many things when the other mind flowed through him. Now it was much more difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. They found him not long after he tried the quick teleport he had done in the plane.

They strapped him up and down, changing him into clothes to facilitate this as soon as they reached the facility they still tried to say was a “school.” Their minds said what it was however. The man’s mind was distant now, but the first of many stains had been left on his mind. His powers beyond just being hit by everyone’s mind were fresh at his finger when they wheeled him just a bit too close to the man. They had no care for keeping him away from a man whose only life was in his mind. The man with no vital signs that stubbornly continued to live. The man who once more pulled him and used him. 

It was the same sort of blankness that swallowed him when he read his father’s mind. Similar to the mind that made him crash, but this time he remembered to close his eyes as he was pushed in. To be so close to them and distant all at the same time only let him barely understand what action they were taking. But he wanted to help them all the same. Because they did that for him, right? Because people in the right helped people. He could feel himself be handed from mind to mind only as new negative emotions filled him. The fullest he was allowed to come up for was to set down the boy’s mind so he wouldn’t be burned up. A child’s mind was stronger he found, but not as controlling. Perhaps the boy’s youth barely left enough space in him for all his anger, so it more easily came out and through him.

And then there was Eli. And there were those blissful days. Perhaps the best days he’d had since his powers had first woken up. Perhaps better even still than his whole life before then at times. His body still felt a touch misaligned to him, his mind stained from the ones who had used and usurped it. But it was still more control, still with a mind so strong he didn’t even hear the rain.

Then things happened that he burned the memories of.

He heard a sharp gasp behind him.

He turned to find a man. His thoughts ran thick with displeasure that he had to follow him, though now his mind was quickly filling with terror and awe, drowning these thoughts like they were a hero trapped in a flooding room. He realized too late that in trying to drown in his own thoughts rather than the world’s while he went unmasked about his business, he had let himself drift from walking to the now easier and more natural floating. He sank quickly and grabbed the man’s hand to first check when he started bobbing along, then if the man had seen anyone seeing him, and then who he was. The answers came quickly enough and in this order: just now, no, the KGB.

His mind roiled with curses. He would have to disappear again. He stared at the man who’s frozen face dared not speak, but whose mind still ran rampant. He found the name and face of someone the man knew in these terrified thoughts, giving what was not a laugh but more a short burst of air out the stump of his nose to see the man was thinking about how much he would miss seeing the person, then gave the strong suggestion that he was this person. Perhaps a little too strong, since as soon as the idea settled into his mind the man began to fuss about his own poor dress for the weather.

He realized this could be an excellent opportunity. This could finally get him the supplies he needed without having to: A. try and find a source without his mask (hell) B. Do the same thing with it and hide himself from anyone who might see him (not hellish but still unwieldy and difficult) C. Be sneaky and get it with the mask on without mentaly hiding himself from everyone (he never was a subtle man) or D. A mix of all of these methods (and his current means, though now he suspected that the method hadn’t quite accounted for the KGB). So, he decided to play along.

But as the man pulled him along and he tried to retreat into his memories again to hide from his talkative lips and mind, something unexpected happened. Silence actually came. Not “silence” as in “I have managed to stop trying to understand the faceless hoard of thoughts pushing between my ears”. Or even that there was something else that, with some effort, he could turn his attention onto to hold them back. No. No, silence came because something clocked him up the back of his head.

Something dark and heavy hung in his mind.

No. That was wrong. Something heavy was wrapped over his head. Easy to get that confused when your life is mostly you dissociating as you become someone else’s puppet, he thought. Despite the short reprieve he was still in the mood for a day spent filling his head with pity. It had a sort of metallic taste to it and a root and a hatred. All things he rather liked.

The heavy thing wrapped around his head was somewhat interesting. He could already guess it was lead of some sort. He hated lead. Sure, with enough layers it could give a good quiet. But here, thin, smelling more metallic than usual and also the wrong sort of metallic, and unable to guess if they had used it because they used it often on captured peoples or knew the doctors had tried it before, it just left the minds loud but nonsensical. Words echoed too many times and muffled just enough that it gave annoyingly little relief and also left his mental powers notably useless. In this state he was just a man with too much noise in his head who could light things on fire with his mind and lift them up. Which he thought left him rather unimpressive in the grand scheme of things he’d seen.

Finally sounds that were muffled but also notably not thoughts approached. Footsteps. He guessed heavy shoes on a light person. He liked listening to the shoes of people. They were rarely as annoying as their masters. Honestly, he did it to revel in how he didn’t have to worry about being heard in such a way. Which he knew he did for that reason and didn’t particularly care that he did.

The man was talking. He couldn’t tell if it was the same man or just another man who was rightfully terrified to have to be anywhere near him. They sounded the same. Russian and scared. He didn’t actually mind listening to the man. Scared Russian was a sound he liked quite well. As soon as the man finished whatever he was saying he tried very hard to think of nothing, succeeding for brief stints before thinking about how quiet it was or something stupid like that.

He flirted with the idea of killing the man. He took the idea out for drinks and then came home and had a very drunk conversation with it. He woke up to find himself curled around it, but filled with nothing, and found the relationship had nothing going for it. So instead he said something which caused the man’s mind to suddenly actually be quiet in sheer surprise.

“тогда найми меня.”

**Author's Note:**

> The second to last line has been haunting me for days so I can only hope it will stop now that I have finally written it down.


End file.
